GoodBuyGuys Blog

Occasionally, I get a call (a complaint, really) from a customer who is unhappy because a tape product they ordered was described as being two inches wide, but turned out to really be only about 1 7/8″ in width. They’re not happy, and I don’t blame them. This is usually someone who wants to use tape as a trim or binding product rather than for securing cables, and they discover that they did not get what they expected. All we can do is apologize, refund their money and honor our guarantee.

We’ve been selling tape for a long time and the change in width came about 5 or 6 years ago. Rather than raise prices, all the major US domestic tape manufacturers changed their standard from being two inches wide to 48 mm wide. For most users, this did not really impact their ability to use the tape and they never noticed the change.

Unfortunately, the tape makers changed the width but did not change the description. The metric equivilent is usually marked in parentheses on the box (each 1 inch in width is actully 24 mm) but this info rarely appears in the tape description and some manufacturers fail to acknowledge the disrepancy at all.

Odder still, while tape makers converted to metric equivilents for tape widths, they continued to use the imperial measuring standard for lengths. Most tape continues to be offered in the industry standard of 60 yds. Nobody really has an explanation for mixing the two standards. It really servers the manufacturer and no one else.

We have include info on this width standard in our website, but as long as the major manufacturers continue to label standard gaffers tape and duct tape as being two inches in width, we’ll have to stick with their standard.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your gaffers tape needs.

We don’t actually have a store front, but occasionally we do have walk in customers and they are always welcome. We have been discovered by the local “hooping” community and several of our customers drop by to get tape for their custom made hoops.

Today, one of our favorites, a local hooper named Julia dropped in to get some tape. Julia is well known in the hooping world and works both as a teacher and performer. I’ve been particularly interested in following her career since finding out about her trips to Haiti and how much the children she works with there enjoy what she does.

She posed a question that got me to thinking. Most of the products we sell are not intended for long term exposure to your skin, nor are they intended to be used by children. Julia wondered if we had any information regarding whether the vinyl tapes she purchases from us could be potentially toxic to a hooper. I regret to say, I had no idea.

I’ve written before about the problems with the quality of counterfeit Chinese batteries, and, while our electrical tape would not be considered counterfeit, it is an import and may not be subject to the same sort of quality controls that domestic products face.

So far my research has led me to the 3M web site (they are probably the largest manufacturer of vinyl tapes in the world) and the MSDS (material safety data sheet) for their premium vinyl electrical tape indicates that there are no safety issues related to its use. I realize that this is not the final answer but it is a start.

Its great when a different type of customer opens up new sales opportunities, and if we are going to serve the hooping community, we want to do it right.

Check back here for some follow up information.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands.

Its become way too easy to keep track of what the competition is up to. If you are interested in what is being written by or about a competitor or supplier, you need to start monitoring the blogs.

Jump over to a site like Technorati and you’ll be amazed at what you might find. Sites that index blogs (like Technorati) are great equalizers. If the blog posting you are looking for has been keyword enriched, then the writings of a small-time blogger will get the same attention as someone who writes for The New York Times.

We are currently tracking the news regarding the possibility that Protor & Gamble will sell its newly acquired Duracell division. What happens here will have a big impact on our battery sales.

The speculation that P&G will spin off this brand is getting lots of notice in the news and the blogosphere has much speculation about what might happen. Its time consuming to subscibe to blogs and newsfeeds, but Technorati lets you use simple search technology to find what you need when you have time to read.

If you want to know what customers or contacts might be saying about your company in their blogs you can quickly search your own name to see if you have gotten any mentions. There is probably no quicker way to preempt some bad information to to respond to a customer issue than to be able to quickly respond to a blog posting.

Another good source for blog searching is Googles Blog Search.   Just enter the same sort of search criteria you would place in a regular Google search field, but your seach will look at blog postings instead.  You’ll get different results than Technorati but both blog search engines return lots of interesting results.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

If you carry a cell phone, you know how easy it is to receive calls, no matter where you are. Your phone number works all over the country. Folks who use VOIP phone services like Skype and Vonage can plug their internet phones in almost anywhere in the world and get calls on their local phone number.

Justin Timberlake’s Future Sex/Loveshow has taken the concept of staying connected to a new level. As reported in the July 2007 edition of PLSN magazine, the Timberlake summer tour is saving thousand of dollars on telco costs by carrying its own internet based phone system.

WANetics LLC is providing the hardware and technical expertise that lets the Future Sex/Loveshow skip the costs of having the venue provide expensive temporary phone service and hardware. Not only do they not incur local telecommunications expenses, but details like phone and fax number remain unchanged, regardless of where the tour is performing.

Each of the tours five departments (promoter, production, accounting, crew and tour management) has its own dedicated road case that accomodates phones, cables, a fax machine, batteries, wifi and an ethernet switch. All voice and data services are provided through a broadband internet connection and then distributed on a frequency that will travel well throughout the production area of the venue and will not interfere with WIFI frequencies.

According to the PLSN article, the tour reported that voice quality was excellent and that overall service was good even in venues where internet quality was less than perfect. Best of all, the whole system worked no matter what part of the world they were in. The system even provided special phone capabilities like voicemail and conferencing.

Personally, after having paid lots of these telco bills myself while working as a promoters rep, I’m not shedding any tears for the local phone companies that will lose this revenue stream. They consistently overcharged and underperformed.

Look for this service to become the standard for large touring organizations of all sorts in the near future.

Want to know more about WANetics tour support? Here’s the link!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. All the supplies a major entertainment tour needs.

I’ve never been a big sports fan, but I began to follow some major sports when we had a chance to supply some very high profile events like the Super Bowl, NFL Playoffs, and The Kentucky Derby, etc. Knowing that we might have gaffers tape on the goal posts or batteries in the referee’s wireless mic has made me more interested.

Along with this interest comes an interest in reading the sports page. Some of the best writers for our local newspaper, The News and Oberver (Raleigh, NC) appear in the sports section and I have found myself drawn there every day. That may be about to change.

Yesterday’s front page of the sports section was really incredible. Out of six lead stories on the first page, only one was really about playing the game, whatever that game might be. Every other story was about some level of corruption in yet another major sport. The dog fighting scandal involving Michael Vick, Barry Bonds steriod use, doping allegations in the Tour de France, and gambling by an NBA referee all stole space from scores, trades and activity by local teams. It was more like reading a tabloid than a major newspaper sports page.

I grew up idolizing big league athletes, but my children have little interest in big time sports. This may or may not be related to the level of scandal, but, regardless, it means that they, and lots of their friends, won’t be buying tickets and purchasing merchandise.

We’ll continue to work with our customers who are involved in supporting major league sports, but if things don’t improve dramatically on the front page of the sports section, this is an industry heading for a major fall.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your microphone accessory and battery needs.

I have written a number of times about the recent retiring of the Permacel brand name for gaffers tape. It has caused a minor upheaval in our marketing and shipping departments, but most customers seem willing to accept the change. It’s true that Shurtape had been making these products under a license from Permacel for the last couple of years, so the only real change has been in the name.

Now a new question has arisen. Who, among the major tape converters and distributors, is going to be the first to totally abandon the name Permacel and go with the designation Shurtape 665. We have played with different labeling designations includeing Permcel/Shurtape 665, Shurtape-Permacel 665, and just “665 Gaffers Tape” but nothing has taken hold. Most of the resellers of this product continue to call it Permacel 665 and the primary converter continues to call it Permacel 665 on their own web site.

Furthermore, Shurtape has been slow in updating their own web sites to show the correct specifications and colors for the products that have been rebranded Shurtape.

We work with many high volume customers who base their purchasing decison on maufacturers specifications and it has been difficult to convince them that the products are unchanged. When we tell them the product are the same, yet the Permacel and Shurtape web sites disagree on the specs of the tape, it is difficult to support our position.

It will be interesting to see if individual resellers are allowed to make the name change at their own pace or if the manufacturer (or Permacel) will force an accelerated adoption of the new name. More later!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your gaffers tape needs.

There is a new gas station down the road from us that has one of the cleverest pricing schemes I have ever seen. The highway this station is on has recently been widened and a median added so southbond traffic can’t turn into the station. The station is on the east side of the divided highway and most of the traffic on this road is north bound in the morning. Morning gas prices are typically 2 cents higher until noon. In the afternoon, they lower the pricing by a couple of cents to tempt south bound traffic to go to the next intersection and make a U turn. Next morning, the price is up again.

One of the advantages of online sales on the web is price flexibility. A web merchant can have instant sales, lower prices on overstocks, and pass along manufacturer discounts to prospective customers. You can test a pricing scheme without spending a lot of money on a catalog or a print ad. If you make a mistake, you can correct it in just a minute.

We experiment with pricing all the time but I don’t ever expect to come up with something as clever as the neighborhood gas station.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands.

I periodically analyze something called a “web log,” which gives us information about how many visitors we have to our sites and how they arrive there. One of my primary interests is in the analysis of search terms, as this is a good indicator of how potential customers are seeking us out.

Recently the logs indicated that someone had found one of our sites using Google, with the search phrase “tape“. We’ve been selling tape for a long time and score really well with search phrases like “gaffers tape” and “Permacel 665” but I never even considered that we could be found through a search term as broad as “tape”. After all, when you search for “tape” in Google you get over 147,000,000 returns.

Imagine my surprise when I searched for “tape” and buytape.com came up as no. 5 on the first page. That’s truly amazing, especially when you consider how many kinds of tape there are and how many different companies sell some kind of tape.

I never cease to be amazed at how diligent, if somewhat boring, search engine optimazation will return truly amazing results. There is really no substitute for attending to the details of what Google and other search engines look for in a well-optimized page. A company of our size and with the resources we have at our disposal should not be able to go head-to-head with companies like 3M and Polyken and come out on top in web search. This can’t even really be called “leveling the playing field”.

Still, we are pleased to get this sort of recognition and hope that we can hold onto our ranking for a long, long time.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and tape.

We’ve made some changes here recently that have meant that I now have additional web developer responsibilities. It is work that I enjoy, but it can be complicated. The learning curve is steep.

One of the new tasks that has landed on my desk is managing our Google Adwords account. Most of our search engine traffic comes from non-paid search since our web sites score well for lots of keywords, but we still feel that Adwords is worth the trouble.

New, at least to me, is that Adwords gives some additonal value to your site if the landing page (the page that the link in your Adword actually takes the user to) is relevant to the text in the ad. Its hard to believe that this isn’t obvious to anyone who is spending money on Adwords or any keyword driven online advertising.

Why would anyone pay good money for an ad for the keyword “gaffers tape” and then take you to a web page selling paint when you click on their ad. Their site may offer tape somewhere in its pages, but someone doing an online search is not likely to drill down in the site far enough to find it. They will simply click on a competitor’s site.

The amount of time needed to create a custom landing page that has useful references to the actual keyword used in the search is small when compared to the wasted money spent when a keyword-driven search does not provide the information that the user hoped to find.

Google has made tons of money on Adwords and they are to be applauded for being willing to forego some revenue in order to improve the customer experience. Giving less value to a landing page that is not relevant to the search terms is another reason why Google will probably continue to rule in online search.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other useful products.

We continue to suffer fallout from the retiring of Permacel as the brand name for 665 gaffers tape. While customers who have agreed to be shipped the Shurtape version of this product seem satisfied, the long range prospects for this product are clearly in doubt. It didn’t have to be this way.

Lots of our large volume purchasers of gaffers tape place their orders on a quarterly or semiannual basis. The ordering is done by a large (and often offsite) purchasing office and their purchasing decision quite often has little to do with the actual needs of the “hands on” users of the product. These folks in purchasing write specifications for a product and once they have approved a specific product and its specs, then this information is embedded in lots of documents and procedures that control what can actually be bought.

Even though we have assured these customers that the products are identical, their procedures and purchasing manuals don’t allow for a quick and simple change from one manufacturer to another. The process of approving a new product may require writing new specs, submitting their purchasing needs out for new bids and getting approval from folks far removed from those who use the tape. This decision making can take a long time and sometimes the results are not what anybody really hoped for.

Because the brand name “Permacel” was so deeply entrenched in the purchasing process of large institutions it can’t simply be replaced with “Shurtape“. Permacel was the dominant brand for gaffers tape for so long that their name had become synonymous with the term “gaffers tape“. Since distributors were given no warning that this change was coming, we did not have a chance to get samples into these buyers hands in time to aid in a smooth transition.

We are hopeful that, over time, these loyal customer can accomodate this change and we can pick up these relationships again. These were good customers and we miss them.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other cloth tapes.